The three levels of HTML5 usage | Hacker News Reader

The three levels of HTML5 usage

mathiasbynens.be

70 pointsshawndumas10 comments

Strictly speaking, it's a slash not a solidus.

Unicode actually gets it wrong, the character / SOLIDUS is not a solidus at all, it is a (forward) slash. A solidus has a much more shallow angle and was used as a separator in old British currency, and is still used in Mathematics. Ironically the Unicode character for an actual solidus is ⁄ FRACTION SLASH.

Further reading: http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Solidus...

That makes his use of the term "solidus" a bit baffling (maybe it's referred to as such somewhere in the HTML5 specs?). I actually assumed he must mean both the characters in "/>" -- glad you mentioned it before I made a fool of myself somewhere.

Yes, it's in the HTML spec as "solidus" because Unicode 0x47 is "SOLIDUS". That's the right thing to do in an important spec. It's just confusing in a blog post though, as most people have not heard of a solidus, and now they've learnt it wrong!

I’ve always used the term “solidus” whenever I refer to the slash in `/>` in self-closing elements in XML/XHTML.

In any other situation I’d call it a slash.

I am sure I was using anchor tags with 'display: block' long before HTML5. Did browsers support this despite it not being in HTML4?

I believe his point is that in HTML5 block elements inside the a element is valid.

They have always supported it, but it's never been valid.

This CSS:

    article, aside, footer, header, section {
        display: block;
    }

Does not make the new sectioning elements work in IE8. It sucks but since IE8 is the highest version of IE available for Windows XP and Win7 machines still ship with IE8 installed as default, supporting this browser will continue to be critical for all consumer sites for the next several years, minimum. Besides, using:

    <div class="header">

Is not that bad.

They do work* in IE6/7/8 with one more hack (linked later in the article):

http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-shiv/

*) for DOM/styling purposes. The fancy new outline algorithm isn't implemented anywhere yet :(

Very helpful indeed. Thanks

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